LC (Ooz 



Wjl 



THE 

LIBERAL EDUCATION OF THE 
NINETEENTH CENTURY. 



BY 



Pkof. WILLIAM P. ATKINSON', 

OF THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, 



{REPRINTED FROM THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, NOVEMBER, 1873.] 



NEW YOEK: 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

549 & 551 BROADWAY. 

1873. 



■JiC 



10 I 



Enterhd, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1S73, 
Bt d. APPLETON & CO., 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



LIBERAL EDUCATION OF THE NINETEENTH 

CENTURY. 1 

The collapse of that classical system of liberal education which 
has held almost undisputed sway since the revival of learning in 
the sixteenth century, and the now generally recognized in sufficiency 
of the theory which makes the study of the languages of Greece and 
Rome the sole foundation of the higher education, are leading, as all 
familiar with the educational thought of the present day are aware, to 
the greatest variety of speculations as to the system which is destined 
to supersede it. That a theory of liberal education as well adapted 
to the wants of the nineteenth — or, shall we not rather say the 
twentieth — century, as was the classical theory to the wants of the 
sixteenth, has yet been elaborated, would be quite too much to affirm. 
We are living in the midst of a chaos of conflicting opinions, and it 
seems to be the duty of all who think at all on a subject on which the 
vital interests of the future so much depend, and especially incum- 
bent on all practical teachers to make such contribution as they are 
able, from their studies and reflection or their experience, toward the 
right solution of the problem. It is to such a contribution that I now 
ask«your attention. 

I begin with a definition of Liberal Education, in regard to which 
I presume we shall not be much at variance. The term liberal is op- 
posed to the term servile. A liberal education is that education which 
makes a- man an intellectual freeman, as opposed to that which makes 
a man a tool, an instrument for the accomplishment of some ulterior 
aim or object. The aim of the liberal education of any period is the 
right use of the realized capital of extant knowledge of that period, 
for the training of the whole, or only of some privileged part of the 

1 A paper read in the Department of Higher Instruction at the annual meeting of the 
National Teachers' Association at Elmira, N. Y., August, 1873. 



4 LIBERAL EDUCATION OF THE 

rising generation, to net the part and perform the duties of free, intel- 
lectual, and moral beings. So far as the nature of the human mind 
and the foundations of human knowledge remain the same from age to 
age and generation to generation, a liberal education is the same thing 
in every age and generation ; so far as the condition of society varies 
from age to age, and as the accumulated capital of extant knowledge 
increases, the liberal education of one generation will differ from that 
of another. There are, therefore, both constant and variable factors 
in our problem. It is with the variable factors, as modifying our con- 
ception of the liberal education of the nineteenth century, that I have 
here chiefly to do. 

I reckon five leading influences which are acting powerfully to 
modify all our old theories, and slowly working out a new ideal of 
liberal education : 1. A truer psychology, giving us for the first time 
a true theory of elementary teaching. 2. Progress in the science of 
philology, enabling us to assign their right position to the classical 
languages as elements in liberal culture, and giving us, in modern 
philological science, an improved and more powerful teaching instru- 
ment. 3. The first real attempt to combine republican ideas with the 
theory of liberal education — in other words, to make the education of 
the whole ]:>eople liberal, instead of merely the education of certain 
privileged classes and protected professions. And when I say the 
whole people, I mean men and women. Nothing, I will say in pass- 
ing, to my mind so marks us as still educational barbarians, so stamps 
all our boasted culture with illiberality, as an exclusion of the other 
sex from all share in its privileges. No education can be truly liberal 
which is not equally applicable to one sex as to the other. 4. As the 
influence more profoundly modifying our conceptions of liberal educa- 
tion than any other, I reckon the advent of modern physical science. 
5. I count among those influences the growing perception that art and 
testhetic culture are equally necessary as an element in all education 
worthy of the name. Let me give the few words, which are all the 
time will allow me, to each of these influences. 

And, first, the advance we have been making toward a truer edu- 
cation-philosophy, based upon truer conceptions in regard to the 
growth and early development of the human mind, is pretty well dis- 
posing of what, perhaps, I may be permitted to call the old-fashioned 
grindstone-theory of elementary education ; the doctrine, namely, that, 
as preparation for higher culture, all youthful minds require a certain 
preliminary process of sharpening upon certain studies, valueless or 
next to valueless in themselves, at least so far as regards the vast ma- 
jority of their recipients, but quite as needful, nevertheless, to them as 
to all others who are hereafter to be considered as liberally educated, 
for the indirect benefit their pursuit was supposed to confer. The ac- 
cepted theory of liberal education has heretofore been, that it was a 
certain very special kind of training which required this peculiar pre- 



NINETEENTH CENTURY. 5 

liminary sharpening process, and that, as the instruments for it, there 
were certain almost divinely-appointed studies exclusively set apart, to 
wit, the grammars of two dead languages, and the elementary por- 
tions of abstract mathematics. It was not and could not be main- 
tained that these studies would ever be the natural choice of the 
youthful mind in the beginning of its scholastic career ; rather, it was 
thought to be a prime recommendation that they were as remote as 
possible from any thing the youthful mind would of itself appropriate 
as intellectual nutriment. Like medicine, the value of such disciplinary 
studies was supposed to be in direct proportion to their disgustfulness ; 
for they were not food to nourish the mind withal, but tonics, where- 
with artificially to strengthen it. They were rods for the spiritual part, 
the counterparts of those material ones which the strong right arm of 
the ancient pedagogue wielded with such efficiency on the bodies of 
his youthful charge, and the benefit of both alike was not utilitarian, 
but disciplinary. 

That I may not be suspected of caricaturing, I will make two quo- 
tations, the first from a lecture by Prof. Sellar, Professor of Greek in 
the University of Edinburgh : " The one extreme theory," he says, 1 " is 
that education is purely a discipline of the understanding ; that the 
form of the subject is every thing, the content little or nothing. A 
severe study, such as classics or mathematics, is the thing wanted to 
train or brace the faculties ; it does not matter whether it is in itself 
interesting or not. The student will find sufficient interest in the 
sense of power which he has to put forth in training for the great race 
with his competitors. ' It is not knowledge,' they say, ' but the exer- 
cise you are forced to incur in acquiring knowledge that we care about. 
Read and learn the classics simply for the discipline they afford to the 
understanding. You may, if it comes in your way and does not inter- 
fere with your training, combine a literary pleasure with this mode of 
study, but this is no part of your education. As teachers, we do not 
care to encourage it ; we do not care to interpret for you the thought 
or feeling of your author. All such teaching is weak and rhetorical : 
we do not profess to examine into your capacity of receiving pleasure. 
Accurate and accomplished translation, effective composition in the 
style of the ancient authors, thorough grammatical and philological 
knowledge — these are our requirements. The training in exactness, in 
concentration, in logical habits, and in discernment of the niceties of 
expression, is the one thing with which we start you in life. Whether 
you have thought at all, or care to think about the questions which 
occupy and move the highest minds, is no affair of ours.' 

" This theory is, I think, a purely English theory of education. It 
has grown up within the last half-century, and it is in the University 
of Cambridge that it has been, and still is, most fully realized." 

My other extract shall be from an essay by the Public Orator of the 

1 " Theories of Classical Teaching : A Lecture," p. 10. 



6 LIBERAL EDUCATION OF THE 

University of Cambridge : " I conclude, then," says Mr. "W. G. Clark, 1 
"that the first subject of study must be the same for all, and that it is 
no valid objection to any subject to affirm that it is dry and distaste- 
ful, but, on the contrary, a strong recommendation. It cannot be de- 
nied that this condition is amply satisfied by the Latin accidence, as 
exhibited in our time-honored and much-abused text-books. . . . The 
question arises where, besides the Latin grammar, we can find any other 
subject equally dry, and by consequence as powerfully tonic to the 
juvenile mind, which recommends itself as deserving in lieu thereof 
to form the basis of education by its general applicability and greater 
fertility of after-results. Except the Greek language, which, from its 
intimate connection with the Latin in structure and literature, is a 
necessary complement to it, and not a possible substitute for it, I know 
of none." 

Here we have the very essence of what I have denominated the 
grindstone-theory. I think that a truer philosophy has exploded 
these fallacies, and wellnigh obliterated that ai'tificial line of dis- 
tinction between studies for use and studies for discipline. True 
education remains and must remain forever a discipline ; but juster 
views in regard to the nature of the youthful mind are beginning to 
show us that that discipline is of the nature of a nutritive rather 
than a curative process, and that the disgust felt by the recipient for 
the means employed is no measure of their disciplinary value. We 
are discovering that the idea of discipline inheres not in the nature 
of certain particular subjects, distinguishing them from all others 
which are non-disciplinary and merely utilitarian, but in the right 
method of teaching all subjects ; and the question, whether at any 
particular period or stage of progress a subject is to be used for 
purposes of mental discipline, dejiends not at all upon the question 
whether it belongs to one or the other of two imaginary classes, the 
disciplinary and the non-disciplinary, but trpon the quite different 
questions whether the study is valuable in itself, and whether it is 
suited to that particular stage of the pupil's mental progress. If so, 
and if rightly taught, it will then be sure to be the right discipline. 

This change in our education-philosophy has brought with it a cor- 
responding change in our scale and estimate of the relative value of 
various studies as the instruments and materials of education ; and, I 
think, we have almost heard the last of the doctrine that abstract 
grammar and abstract mathematics are the divinely-appointed whet- 
stones and sharpeners of the youthful mind, and hence of the system 
Which makes a compulsory study of the Greek and Latin languages 
the only gate of admission to the privileges of the higher education. 
In place of that very simple but most unphilosophical doctrine, I trust 
that a truer psychology is providing us with a course of liberal study, 
based upon corrector notions in regard to the laws of mental dcvelop- 

1 " Cambridge Essays," for 1855. 



NINETEENTE CENTURY, 7 

ment. That we have such a completed practical psychology, or any 
such logical and symmetrical course or courses of study based upon it, 
is more than can be asserted, for education, as a science, is still in its 
infancy ; but we certainly have attained to certain general principles 
which are fundamental as regards the elementary education of the 
future; and the most important of these, which is even now revolu- 
tionizing all our methods of elementary teaching, is the direct result 
of the progress of modern physical science. It is, that education be- 
gins with the concrete, and not with the abstract, and that the right 
method for the teaching even of language itself is the right training 
and development of the child's senses. The Latin grammar, there* 
fore, as the right instrument for training the youthful mind, is fast dis- 
appearing, along with that birch which was its material symbol and 
needful complement, and a striking witness to the absurdity of the use 
we put it to. JZequiescat in pace ! The lovers of the noble science 
of classical philology may well be congratulated on its emancipation 
from such degrading servitude. 

In place of this rude and crude, and now happily obsolescent the- 
ory, a deeper philosophy is leading us to inquire into the nature of the 
undeveloped mind, and the true order of the development of its facul- 
ties, and is, at the same time, guiding us to the right choice of means 
for stimulating their natural and healthful growth and unfolding. 
And here I will say that the answer which psychology gives to these 
questions seems to me a little in danger of being misinterpreted for 
the time being by one class of educational reformers. In their re- 
action against the premature and unnatural stimulus given to the 
powers of abstraction by the old system, they are in danger of run- 
ning into the opposite extreme of paying a too exclusive attention 
to the development of the observing powers in the new — a tendency 
which the influence of modern physical science on our educational 
ideas, especially, tends to foster. I doubt whether one extreme 
will prove any better than the other, for both are equally one-sided. 
The true lesson we are to learn is, above all things, to have regard to 
balance and proportion. The youthful mind is not a different thing 
from the same mind in its maturity. The germs of all faculties exist 
in it, and their development is in no linear order, but rather like rays 
diverging from one centre ; and the true conception of the different 
stages of education is, as being divided by concentric circles, cutting 
those rays at equal distances from the centre. The child's observing 
powers should furnish him with intellectual material no faster than his 
powers of abstraction can work it up into intellectual products, or than 
the development of his powers of expression can give form to them. 
On the other hand, his powers of expression should never be developed 
in empty words, beyond the limits of his acquisition of the ideas words 
stand for, as is now the case with so much of our word-mongering edu- 
cation. Again, his imagination should never outrun his reason on the 



3 LIBERAL EDUCATION OF THE 

one hand, nor his memory overload it on the other, in accordance with 
that preposterous doctrine we sometimes hear propounded, which ad- 
vocates the employment of the youthful memory in laying up stores 
of unintelligible knowledge, in anticipation of an after-time, when it 
will become intelligible — as if there could be such a thing as not- 
understood knowledge, in any other sense than as we speak of undi- 
gested food — turning to poison in the system. The child is a philoso- 
pher, a moralist, a poet in little, quite as much as he is an observer or 
a rememberer, and his whole moral and intellectual growth will be 
warped and stunted so long as you insist upon looking on him as a 
mere observing or a mere memorizing machine, a mere receptacle for 
facts or for words either. 

If I am right in this view of the true character of elementary edu- 
cation, it follows that the great departments, into which it should from 
the very first be divided, correspond exactly with the primary divis- 
ions of knowledge itself, as they will continue for the pupil forever 
after. Let me, for the puqjoses of this discussion, make a triple divis- 
ion of knowledge into physical, ethical, and oesthetical, according as 
our thought is concerned with the world of matter, the world of mind, 
and the world of art or beauty. I am concerned here less for strict- 
ness of philosophical accuracy than for the practical convenience of 
this division. Now, as, in accordance with our fundamental concep- 
tion of liberal education, the question as to a choice between these de- 
partments of liberal learning is a futile one, because all are essential 
elements in our conception of liberal education — so, if I am right, no 
conception of elementary education can be a correct one that does not 
provide for them all from the very beginning. 

I need hardly point out what a change in all our methods this 
change in our philosophy implies ; for it involves the doctrine that 
the true place to begin the teaching of all art, all science, all knowl- 
edge, is the primary school ; and I am not in the least afraid of the 
seeming paradox. Rather I would earnestly maintain that, unless we 
treat the child in the primary school as the germ and embryo of all 
he is destined afterward to become, our education will be doomed to 
ignominious failure. Whatever, therefore, enters into our conception 
of liberal education — and we have already seen that nothing less than 
all extant knowledge should enter into it — that should enter into it 
from the beginning. Language and literature should be the subjects 
of elementary teaching ; science should be the subject of elementary 
teaching ; art should be the subject of elementary teaching. What- 
ever is to enter into the higher stages of education is to have its seed 
planted there, or it never will be planted. The true distinction, there- 
fore, between disciplinary and non-disciplinary, is not a distinction be- 
tween one set of studies begun early and another set of studies begun 
late, one set of studies pursued for training, and another set of studies 
mastered for use : it is a distinction between the earlier and the later 



NINETEENTH CENTURY, 9 

stages of all studies whatever. The child, as well as the man, is linguist, 
student of science, artist, philosopher, moralist, poet, though his philol- 
ogy, science, art, philosophy, will be childish, not manly, germs and in- 
tuitions, not results of developed reason. Is it not obvious that in this 
view elementary schools become something far more than places for 
drilling the youthful mind in the use of the mere tools of knowledge ? 
Is it not obvious, moreover, that, looked at from this point of view, a 
man's profession is only the outgrowth and fruitful consummation of 
his whole training ; a divergence, when the time arrives that the whole 
of knowledge becomes too wide a field to cultivate, into some special 
fruit-bearing direction, which, whatever it may be, will lead to a truly 
liberal profession, inasmuch as by a man so trained his calling cannot 
but be followed in a liberal spirit ? 

We have in England and America no conception of what may be 
accomplished in the early stages of education, because we have been, 
to so great an extent, adherents of the grindstone-theory. " No- 
where," says Mr. Joseph Payne, commenting on the lamentable, almost 
ludicrous, failure of that embodiment of the grindstone-theory, applied 
to popular teaching through the medium, not of the Latin grammar, 
but of the three li's — I mean the so-called English " Revised Code " — 
" nowhere have I ever met, in the course of long practice and study 
in teaching, with a more striking illustration of the great truth that, 
just in proportion as you substitute mechanical routine for intelligent 
and sympathetic development of the child's powers, you shall fail in 
the object you are aiming at." 1 I think that the insignificant results 
of our present elementary schools, as compared with the amount of 
time, thought, and money, expended on them, and their want of real 
vitality, are to be mainly traced to this fundamentally false concep- 
tion of elementary teaching as concerned only with the acquisition of 
the mere tools of knowledge. 2 By its fruits, or rather by its barren- 

1 " Of four-fifths of the scholars about to leave school, either no account, or an unsat- 
isfactory one, is given by an examination of the most strictly elementary kind " (Report 
for 1869-'70). " We have never yet passed 20,000 in a population of 20,000,000 to the 
sixth standard ; whereas old Prussia, without her recent aggrandizement, passed nearly 
380,000 every year" (speech of Mr. Mundella, in the House of Commons, March 18, 
1870). " What we call education in the inspected schools of England is the mere seed 
used in other countries, but with us that seed, as soon as it has sprouted, withers and 
dies, and never grows up into a crop for the feeding of the nations " (speech of Dr. 
Lyon Playfair, in the House of Commons, June 20, 18*70). See the Fortnightly Review 
for August, 1873, and Payne in Social Science Transactions for 1872. If we should ever 
need — which God forbid ! — a warning against the folly of substituting a sectarian for a 
national system of popular education, we may find it in the wretched perversion of Eng- 
lish popular education in the hands of her Established Church. 

2 " What wonder if very recently an appeal has been made to statistics for the pro- 
foundly foolish purpose of showing that education is of no good — that it diminishes 
neither misery nor crime among the masses of mankind ? I reply, Why should the thing 
which has been called education do either the one or the other ? If I am a knave or a 
fool, teaching me to read and write won't make me less of either one or the other — 



io LIBERAL EDUCATION OF THE 

ness, we may know it ; and I may add that it is because in our com- 
mon schools we are completely outgrowing it, that day by day we see 
in them so much new life. 

So much in regard to the debt which a liberal education is des- 
tined soon to owe to the progress of psychology, giving prevalence to 
truer views in regard to its rudimentary processes. Let me pass to 
the second influence, which is acting powerfully to modify all our 
previous conceptions of the subject ; I mean the progress of modern 
linguistic science. I take this next in order because, contrary to the 
current of thought prevailing at the present moment, I believe the 
old doctrine will still be found to hold true, even after physical science 
shall have at last found its true place in the new education, that the 
study of that wonderful world of matter, which is the stage on which 
man plays his earthly part, wonderful as it is, is yet inferior in dignity 
and importance to the study of the being and doing of the actor who 
plays his part thereon. Scientific studies, though for the time being 
in the ascendant, yet, even when all their rights shall be accorded to 
them, will, in a well-balanced system, take their place a little below 
ethical studies. This, I say, as not believing in the current material- 
istic philosophy in any of its forms, but as being an immaterialist, as 
I must phrase it, since we have been robbed by unworthy and de- 
grading associations of the word spiritualist. But, without raising 
any question of precedence between branches of study which are both 
essential to any true conception of a complete education, let me pro- 
ceed to point out that the progress of linguistic science and of modern 
literature has totally transformed the educational character and posi- 
tion of the ethical studies of which they are the instrument and the 
embodiment. When the Revival of Learning gave birth to the present 
classical system of literary, or, as I have termed it, ethical liberal study, 
it did so by putting into the hands of scholars not merely two gram- 
mars as instruments of youthful mental discipline, as the advocates of 
the grindstone-system would fain have us believe, but two languages 

unless somebody shows me how to put my reading and writing to wise and good 
purposes. 

" Suppose any one were to argue that medicine is of no use, because it could be proved 
statistically that the percentage of deaths was just the same among people who had been 
taught how to open a medicine-chest, and among those who did not so much as know 
the key by sight. The argument is absurd ; but it is not more preposterous than that 
against which I am contending. The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the 
other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put 
into his hands the great keys of the wisdom-box. But it is quite another matter whether 
he ever opens the box or not. And he is as likely to poison as to cure himself, if, with- 
out guidance, he swallows the first drug that comes to hand. In these times a man may 
as well )>e purblind as unable to read — lame, as unable to write. But I protest, that if 
I thought the alternative were a necessary one, I would rather that the children of the 
poor should grow up ignorant of both these mighty arts than that they should remain 
ignorant of that knowledge to which these arts are means." — (Huxley, " Lay Sermons," 
p. 43.) 



NINETEENTH CENTURY. n 

that unlocked the stores of a whole new world of ethical thought, in 
the shape of the philosophy, the history, and the poetry contained in 
Greek and Roman literature. How assiduously those literatures were 
studied, how they leavened the whole thought of Europe, and mightily 
contributed to disperse the intellectual darkness and break the bonds 
of the spiritual despotism of the medieval Church, we all know. Clas- 
sical philosophy, history, poety, and art, nourished the European mind, 
and were almost the sole foundation of its culture, through all the 
period during which the Latin and Teutonic races of Western Europe 
were slowly elaborating languages and literatures of their own. They 
were thus of necessity the main instrument of culture of the schools 
during the period when, save the obsolete scholastic philosophy, no 
other instrument was forthcoming ; and I do not think it possible to 
overrate the debt which Western Europe owes to them. But grad- 
ually their educating influence has been absorbed, and in great meas- 
ure exhausted, while partially, but by no means wholly, out of the 
nutriment they furnished have sprung the national languages and 
literatures which, as more and not less powerful educating instru- 
mentalities, are to supersede them. It is to ignore the vast progress 
of the human mind since the days of Erasmus to try any longer to 
make classical learning stand in the same relation to the modern stu- 
dent that it stood in to Erasmus : and Erasmus, if he were alive to- 
day, would be the first to abandon the dead pedantries of the past for 
the fountains of new thought he would see flowing all round him. 

When I say, then, that I think the languages and literatures of 
Greece and Rome are soon to be abandoned, as the sole or main in- 
struments of that side of liberal culture which I have preferred to call 
ethical rather than literary, it is not that I do not fully recognize their 
value and beauty, or the vast service they have done in emancipating 
and training the mind of Western Europe : it is not that I do not 
recognize their value as among the specialties of liberal culture now. 
It is only as the sole or chief instruments of literary school training 
that I believe them to be superseded. So far from believing that they 
will be abandoned, I believe they will be more diligently and success- 
fully studied in the future, when they will be left as a specialty in the 
hands of that small number of students who, at any time, in this mod- 
ern world of ours, will of their own free choice 1 pursue them. As a 

1 The advocates of the classical theory sometimes point triumphantly to the number of 
students who, in colleges where the elective system prevails, freely, as they say, elect the 
classics ; but it should be remembered that at present their whole previous school training 
has been by compulsion classical. Of science they are absolutely ignorant ; and it is not 
strange that they should prefer to go on in studies whose elementary difficulties they have 
partially overcome, rather than engage in a belated encounter with new difficulties, of a sort 
for which their minds have been by their very previous training unfitted. The present 
system at some of our colleges of giving an election between science and literature, after 
admission, and no similar election in regard to preparatory studies, seems to me to be the 
very reductio ad absurdum of the grindstone-theory. 



V 



12 LIBERAL EDUCATION OF THE 

specialty for the few, classical studies still have a future before them, 
and we can ill a fiord to lose the elevating and refining influence exer- 
cised by their real votaries on those who do not directly pursue them ; 
but as the main instruments of liberal culture their day seems to me to 
be nearly over. 

In England, the very stronghold of the classical theory, classical 
study seems to be declining, in spite of, or rather through, the very 
means taken for keeping it alive. " I fear," says the late Earl of Der 
by, in the preface to his translation of the Iliad, " that the taste for and 
appreciation of classical literature are greatly on the decline." " The 
study of classical literature is probably on the decline," says Matthew 
Arnold, in his essay on translating Homer. " I cannot help thinking," 
says Mr. Sidgwick, of Cambridge, "that classical literature, in spite 
of its enormous prestige, has very little attraction for the mass even 
of cultivated persons at the present day. I wish statistics could be 
obtained of the amount of Latin and Greek read in any year, except 
for professional purposes, even by those who have gone through a 
complete classical curriculum. From the information that I have been 
able privately to obtain, I incline to think that such statistics, when 
compared with the fervent admiration with which we all speak of the 
classics, upon every opportunity, would be found rather startling. 1 
And the truth is that the classical system of liberal education in Eng- 
land maintains its place, so far as it does maintain it, solely from the 
fact of its being a strictly protected system, through the enormous pe- 
cuniary prizes to which it is the sole means of access." 2 

Our own attempts to establish a liberal education seem to me to 
have thus far proved little less than abortive, because, following as 
we have in the steps of the mother-country, we cannot bring our- 
selves to abandon the old shadow for the new substance. For 
classical study has really dwindled into a shadow. Once it did 
mean the study of philosophy, of ethics, politics, history, poetry ; 
now, for ninety-nine in a hundred of its students, it means none of 
these, but the mere dry study of grammar. The scholars of the Re- 
naissance read their Plato in the original, and compassed sea and 
land to find a teacher who could unlock for them his treasure-house, 
but it was the treasure-house of his thought, not his grammar. The 

1 " Essays on a Liberal Education, cd. Farrai/," p. 106. 

2 " The prizes proposed," says Dr. Donaldson (" Classical Scholarship and Classical 
Learning," p. 154), " are of enormous value. It is estimated that the first place in either 
Tripos (classics or mathematics) is worth, in present value and contingent advantages, 
about £10.000. ... In classics, the majority of successful candidates for high honors 
have been under tuition in Greek and Latin for at least ten years." 

The number of college fellowships at Oxford is somewhat over 300, and their average 
value £300 per annum. There are 400 scholarships, of an average value of £80, tenable 
for five years. The incomes of nineteen heads of houses arc estimated at £23,000 a year. 
— (Ileywood, in Social Science Transactions for 18*71.) The sole access to all these pecu- 
niary prizes has heretofore been through classical study. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY. 13 

scholars of the Revival, without Shakespeare or Milton, had to master 
Homer and ^Eschylus, or go without poetry altogether. With no 
wealth of modern literature, such as lies all round us, they were per- 
force classical students in order to be scholars. We cannot put back 
the wheels of time, and reproduce their circumstances. The mind of 
the generation refuses to be bound within antiquated limits : it will 
seek the new world of thought which lies before it. Try, therefore, 
to make classical scholars now of all liberally-educated boys, and 
you make nine-tenths of them into dunces or pedants. How many 
of the regiments of young men of this generation who have gone 
through, as it is well called, our older colleges, are real classical 
scholars ? But the liberally-educated men of the times of the revival 
of learning were real classical scholars. 

The Rev. Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, gives the 
following account of the present state of classical study even at Ox- 
ford : " We must not close our eyes to the fact that the honor-stu- 
dents " (that is to say, the students who have any expectation of win- 
ning the pecuniary prizes) " are the only students who are undergoing 
any educational process which it can be considered as the function 
of a university either to impart or to exact ; the only students who 
are at all within the scope of the scientific apparatus and arrangements 
of an academical body. This class of students cannot be estimated 
at more than thirty per cent, of the whole number frequenting the 
university. The remaining seventy per cent, not only furnish from 
among them all the idleness and extravagance which are become a 
byword throughout the country, but cannot be considered to be even 
nominally pursuing any course of university studies at all." x 

If the treasurer of a great manufacturing corporation were to re- 
port to his stockholders that, of all the raw material furnished, their 
machinery was cajtable of making only thirty per cent, into cloth, and 
that of a very peculiar and unsalable pattern ; that the remaining sev- 
enty per cent, was not only not manufactured into any kind of cloth, 
but was much of it disseminated over the country, in the shape of 
deadly, poisonous rags, we should think there was something wrong 
in the machinery of that mill. 

Thus it is that, classical education having dwindled into a shadow, 2 

1 " Suggestions on Academical Organization," p. 230. 

2 " I think it incontestably true," says Prof. S/dgwick, "that for the last fifty years 
our classical studies (with much to demand our undivided praise) have been too critical 
and formal ; and that we have sometimes been taught, while straining after an accu- 
racy beyond our reach, to value the husk more than the fruit of ancient learning. 
.... This, at least, is true, that he who forgets that language is but the sign and vehi- 
cle of thought, and while studying the word knows little of the sentiment— who learns 
the measure, the garb and fashion of ancient song without looking to its living soul or 
feeling its inspiration, is not one jot better than a traveler in a classic land who sees its 
crumbling temples, and numbers, with arithmetical precision, their steps and pillars, but 
thinks not of their beauty, their design, or the living sculptures on their walls, or who 



i 4 LIBERAL EDUCATION OF THE 

our colleges are looking about for a remedy, and a class of thinkers, 
iust now, as we know, very influential, and looking to the substitution 
of the study of science as the sole remedy. Gentlemen, I have been 
lono- enough attached to a school of science to have been convinced, if 
I had ever doubted it, that science by itself is no remedy ; that as there 
can never again be a liberal education, or the pretense of one, without 
the scientific element, so, on the other hand, scientific studies alone can 
never constitute a liberal education — scientific can never supersede 
ethical studies as its foundation. What,' then, is the true remedy ? I 
think it is evident. It is, along with scientific study, of whose true 
place I shall have more to say presently, to accept ethical studies in 
their new form, in the form of modern literatures and modern languages, 
and with classical studies as the special and subordinate, and not, as 
heretofore, the main and primary instrument. This is the great change 
which liberal education is silently undergoing, far more than it is a 
change from a literary to a scientific basis. 

I know of no educational fallacy more common and more mischiev- 
ous than that of enormously overrating the educating value of the 
process of acquiring the mere form of foreign languages, whether dead 
or living ; yet it is in this barren study that we waste the precious time 
that shoidd be employed, from the very beginning of school-life, in 
acquiring the substance of real knowledge. Languages, other than our 
own, are the useful, sometimes the necessary tools for acquiring knowl- 
edge ; in the literatures of other tongues there reside elements of cult- 
ure not to be found, or not to be found in the same perfection in our 
own, which may well repay the student who has time and perseverance 
sufficient really to attain them without too great a sacrifice. But to 
sacrifice an attainable education in not attaining them, what is it but 
to sow the barren sea-shore, to travel half a journey, to possess one's self 
of half an instrument useless without the other half. Languages alone 
are knowledge only to the professed philologist ; we sacrifice a real 
education attainable through an instrument we already possess in the 
fruitless labor of giving our boys other instruments they will never 
make use of. 

counts the stones in the Appian Way, instead of gazing on the monuments of the • Eternal 
City.' "— (" Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge," fifth edition, p. 37.) 
I find a corroboration of this view of the present state of classical study on this side 
of the water coming from a quarter where there can be no suspicion of too great leaning 
toward modern studies. Prof. Tayler Lewis is reported to have expressed himself in a 
recent pamphlet as follows : " He thinks it undeniable that there is danger that classi- 
cal studies may be driven from our colleges ; and, in looking for a reason for this, he 
seems to himself to have discovered it in the fact that we nowadays busy the undergrad- 
uate too much with grammar and too little with literature. ... He illustrates his posi- 
tion by a comparison of the school of critical students even so great as Torson and 
Elmsky with the earlier schools. . . . The one school, admirable as it is, and deep as 
is our obligation to them, he regards as reading Homer for the sake of knowing Greek ; 
the other as knowing Greek for the sake of reading Homer."— {New- York Nation, August 
1, 1873.) 



NINETEENTH CENTURY. i 5 

I think that we monstrously overrate the educating value of the 
mere process of learning other languages ; but with the mother-tongue 
the case is altogether different. Here the mastery of form and substance 
can proceed pari passu. The mother-tongue is the only one which 
can stand to our modern liberal education in the relation in which the 
classical tongues stood to the scholars of the revival of learning. It 
might be said that Greek and Latin were mother-tongues to them as 
scholars, because it was through them alone that they reached the 
thoughts which really educated them. They were not brought up on 
empty words and barren syntax ; they studied no grammars, for gram- 
mars were non-existent. Their minds were really nourished on the 
philosophy of Plato, and Cicero's eloquence, and Homer's poetry, and 
the lessons not the words they found in Tacitus and Thucydides. Now, 
when we have a philosophy, a history, a poetry, a law, an ethics, which 
embody all that is valuable in classical literature, together with all the 
progress of thought has produced through these later centuries, we not 
only fail to use them as those older scholars used their older instru- 
ments,' really and efficiently, but we equally fail in using the older 
ones. We abandon both to feed our boys on a husk without a kernel. 
What wonder that our higher education is struck with barrenness ? 

When, therefore, I propose modern language-study instead of an- 
cient, as a chief instrument of school education, I mean much more than 
the mere substitution of the study of some modern language as lan^ 
guage, for some ancient language as language — German, for instance, 
instead of Greek, as has sometimes been suggested. This would be 
the mere semblance of a remedy, for the difficulty consists in the enor- 
mous overrating, by what I have called the grindstone-theory, of the 
educating value of the study of the mere structure and vocabulary of 
any strange language whatever. It has sometimes been doubted if 
we can ever really know more than one tongue, and certainly all our 
deeper mental processes go on in that one we know best. If that is a 
foreign one, it is because we have lost a mother to gain a step-mother ; 
and a stepmother she will ever remain. What is very certain is, that 
too many of the recipients of our present education, in seeking to pos- 
sess themselves of more than one language, end with having none 
whatever. Neglecting to develop their minds through the instrumen- 
tality of their mother-tongue, and never, therefore, really knowing it, 
they equally fail in providing themselves with any substitute ; with 
Shakspeare's pedants, " they have been at a great feast of languages, 
and stolen the scraps. 1 " 

My position, therefore, is that, so far as language-study shall form 
a part of the elementary discipline of the liberal education of the 
future, the centre and pivot of it all will hereafter be the scientific 
study of the mother-tongue. I anticipate something almost like ridi- 
cule for this proposition on the part of those — and they are many — who 
undervalue our native language so far as to believe it to be incapable 



16 LIBERAL EDUCATION OF THE 

of becoming an instrument of disciplinary education. Time -would fail 
me to go into a defense of this proposition. I will only say that I be- 
lieve that it is precisely the change which the progress of modern 
philology is bringing about; that it is fitting modern languages, and 
preeminently our own, to become the instrument of a true mental dis- 
cipline, so far as language-study can serve as such an instrument. On 
the one hand it is giving a scientific form to the study of the Teutonic 
element, and on the other there remains the still needful study of the 
Latin language — a study which certainly need not lose in force and 
vitality because it may no longer be pursued as the basis of a super- 
structure never to be erected, but shall have a definite object and be 
pursued for a practical end. 

But far above and beyond its uses as language-study comes the 
advantage of the direct and immediate entrance it gives to those re- 
gions of thought in which the higher mental discipline really lies. 
Through the direct road of the real study of the mother-tongue, and 
that rhetorical and, above all, that real logical study which accompa- 
nies and forms a part of it. can the study of what we vaguely denomi- 
nate literature, and that which we are beginning still more vaguely to 
denominate social science, but which yet, between them, contain the 
substance of all we most need to know of man as distinct from Nature, 
be made real portions of general knowledge — be transferred from being 
a possession in the hands of the few, to be reached only by an abstruse 
and difficult preparatory training, secrets unlocked by a key out of 
reach of the hands of the many, to being a part of the general inheri- 
tance of all men. For, to be so, they must be made primary and not 
secondary ; in other words, that time and strength must be devoted 
to a fruitful study of modern thought and modern literature, which 
have heretofore been wasted in school and college on the futile attempt 
to master ancient thought and ancient literature. The rudiments of 
all those studies must be reckoned as the most valuable of all the 
elements of general elementary training, which, in their higher depart- 
6J men ts, and after liberal culture/ diverging, in various directions, form 
the substance of professional knowledge, both that of those professions 
now reckoned, and of all those hereafter to be reckoned liberal. For, 
what should liberal education be but the preparatory general stage for 
that work of life which all honest callings and professions carry on in 
diverse directions afterward? "What is a professional education but 
a liberal education taking a special direction ? 

Can it now be said, with any truth, that our nominally-educated 
young men go out into the world equipped with that general knowl- 
edge of the sciences of law and government, and political economy, 
with that knowledge of ethics and philosophy, with that acquaint- 
ance with modern history and of the condition of the world they 
live in, and with that real taste for modern literature, which should 
form the equipments of every man calling: himself educated? We 



NINETEENTH CENTURY. i 7 

shall have to give a negative answer, just so long as we do not look 
upon all these as the truly disciplinary studies, and the elements of 
all these as the true elementary studies, the very school-studies fitted, 
above all others, for maturing the youthful mind, and filling it with 
true wisdom. So long as we insist upon approaching them through 
the operose and roundabout method of dead-language studies, school- 
days will flee away, and the object will not be accomplished. The 
great vice of our education, as has been well said, is its indirectness. 

Combining the ideas which I have thus presented — 1. That the 
study of foreign languages as languages, whether dead or living, holds 
a place in our present education-philosophy quite out of proportion to 
its real value and importance, and that it is the discipline of philoso- 
phy which we are indirectly aiming at, behind and through the disci- 
pline of language ; 2. That it is through one tongue and not many 
that that discipline can best be imparted, inasmuch as that is the only 
one that can or will ever, by the majority of men, be really mastered ; 
and, 3. That now, for the first time, there is the possibility, through 
the progress of modern linguistic science, of a scientific and systematic 
study of the mother-tongue — I arrive at the conclusion that we are 
presently to have, as a substitute for the exclusive or almost exclusive 
use of classical languages and literatures, as the main disciplinary ele- 
ment in liberal education, a systematic study of the English language 
and a recognition of its literature as primary, not secondary. And 
surely it is a strange phenomenon, if it be true, as a foreign scholar 
has recently maintained, 1 that the sovereignty of the world is hereafter 
to belong to the English language ; and if it be true, as I think may 
well be maintained, that with this conquering language we possess the 
world's foremost literature, it is a strange phenomenon that we think 
them so little worthy of systematic study, give them a place so sub- 
ordinate as instruments of our own liberal culture, that to-day we must 
go to the Germans for a good English grammar ; to the French for 
the best, if a very defective, history of our literature. To my mind, 
no more striking illustration could be given of our want of a true edu- 
cation-philosophy. 

How has it happened that we still lack such a philosophy ? The 
answer to that question brings me to my next point, and the third new 
ingredient in the liberal education of the future, the element contributed 
by republicanism. I have said that the science of education was still 
in its infancy ; I believe that it is only as a part of republican institu- 
tions that it can reach maturity. For the only true liberal education 
is the education of man as man ; the only truly liberal system is that 
which can be applied to a whole nation, and such a system is only 
possible as a part of republican institutions. And, when we consider 
how short a time we have been living under them, and how crude and 
imperfect they still are, it is not strange that they have not yet pro- 

1 De Oandolle. 

2 



i8 LIBERAL EDUCATION OF THE 

duced what will be rather one of their maturest than one of their ear- 
liest fruits, a truly liberal education-system. 

The history of our errors in regard to liberal education is a very 
plain one. They are the legacy of the mother-country from which we 
came, a mother-country which is just beginning to correct her own errors, 
even by the light of our limited experience. I wish to point out and 
emphasize the fact that republicanism revolutionizes our very concep- 
tion of liberal education. All forms of liberal education of the past, 
and preeminently the one we borrowed from England, were forms of 
exclusive class-education. The idea of caste was involved in their very 
conception, to such a degree that the phrase, the liberal education of 
the people, was a contradiction in terms. The antithesis was, popular 
versus liberal education. There was the illiberal or servile education 
of the masses, designed to fit them for the humble station in which it 
had pleased Providence to place them, and to content them therewith ; 
there was the liberal education of the exclusive learned professions, 
and the exclusive aristocratic class, which was liberal by virtue of its 
being the education of the rulers and not the ruled. 1 Now, republican- 
ism, by converting the people into rulers, transfers to them the claim 
to a liberal education, which shall be universal. A transfer of the 
power alone, without a transfer of the privilege and the opportunity 
necessary to prepare for the exercise of it, cannot but be disastrous. 
If republicanism is to remain republicanism, and not degenerate into oli- 
garchy or plutocracy, or end in anarchy, there must be one homoge- 
neous education-system for all, and that one the highest attainable. 
The line of demarcation between liberal and illiberal must be obliter- 
ated, and what cannot be called liberal will be seen to be no education 
at all, but only a miserable counterfeit, by which privileged classes 
strive to perpetuate obsolete distinctions and indefensible abuses. For 
a republic, there can be but one system, and one set of schools ; its 
education, begun on the lowest benches of its national primary 
schools, will one day be completed in the halls of its national uni- 
versities. There will be no question as to the relative dignity of pro- 
tected and unprotected professions, or callings, or classes, but all will 

3 " Religious teaching, from Episcopal charges down to the lessons of the Sunday- 
school, was, for a long time, as most of us can remember, in the habit of assuming that 
true religion was identified with government by the upper classes. . . . We may safely 
say that neither from Catholic nor from Protestant theology could we extract any normal 
witness in favor of the acquisition of political power by the humbler and more numerous 
classes. But the lower classes have not been content to stay in their places. Whatever 
the Church has taught, democracy has advanced irresistibly. Privilege after privilege has 
been wrenched out of the grasp of the favored classes, power has gradually descended, 
by the steps of the social stairs, until it has joined hands with the last class at the bottom. 
At the present time, it is a confessed fact, whether we like it or not, that the working- 
class, if it had peculiar interests, and were unanimously resolved to promote them, might 
dictate the policy of the empire." — (Rev. J. Llwellyn Davies, " Theology and Morality," pp. 
10, 12.) 



NINETEENTH CENTURY. 19 

be reckoned liberal which train and educate the faculties of man as 
man. 1 

Now, the only conception of a liberal education that will satisfy 
these new conditions, the only conception of an education capable of 
becoming national and universal, at the same time that it is liberal, 
is that of a training of the national mind through the mother-tongue 
as the chief, and other tongues as the subordinate instruments, in 
the elements of all those branches of knowledge which, used in their 
rudiments as elements of general training, will develop, in their higher 
stages, into the objects of professional pursuits. Is there any other 
distinction than this between general and professional? In the in- 
fancy of knowledge, all callings, trades, and professions, are mysteries, 
whose secrets are carefully guarded from the uninitiated. Every me- 
chanic belongs to his trade-guild, and has his trade-secrets, when 
Philip of Burgundy destroyed the little town of Dinant, in the 
Low Countries, the art of making copper vessels became, for the 
time being, a lost art. With the progress of general intelligence 
mystery falls away from simpler occupations, but still attaches, to 

1 Nothing seems to me more thoroughly unrepuolican and illiberal than the ground 
taken, by some who profess to be preeminently the advocates of liberal learning, against 
the promotion of higher education by grants from the state. Let the state promote the 
advancement of elementary education, they say, but for higher institutions to handle gov- 
ernment moneys is only to touch pitch, and therewith be defiled. The distinction repre- 
sents a remnant of aristocratic feeling, and springs from, the idea that it is the duty of 
the educated, as a higher class, to take a paternal care for the masses ; not the duty of 
the people, as a self-governing community, to give itself a liberal education. One cannot 
well see a higher function to be performed by the people, acting as a body, than to pro- 
mote, by public action, its own higher education. If a line is to be drawn, beyond which 
its action should not reach, where shall it be drawn ? Shall the people be allowed to pro- 
mote the teaching of the three R's, and the four rules of arithmetic, but be forbidden to 
meddle with any thing beyond them ? And in whose hands is the higher education to 
remain, in a country which has no established church ? Is its progress forever to remain 
at the fitful mercy of an unenlightened and unsystematic private charity ? The question 
as to the right means and methods of governmental action is undoubtedly a grave one, 
but no educational waste of state or national resources is ever likely to equal the waste 
arising from the capricious absurdity of private endowments. We have, indeed, of late, 
been startled by revelations of government corruption, but they have but a poor notion 
of the capacities of republicanism who are scared by them into that meanest of all politi- 
cal theories, the doctrine that the sole function of a government is merely to enact the 
part of head constable. 

A far juster view is that propounded by one of the best of England's teachers. " As 
the condition of social, and, to some extent, political independence," says the Rev. Mark 
Pattison, " is necessary to prevent material interests from stifling and absorbing studies, 
so the condition of sympathy with the general mind is necessary both to sustain the 
required activity and to make the university a proper seminary for the education of the 
national youth. The nation does not hire a number of learned men to teach its children : 
it itself educates them, through an organ into which its own best intellect, its scientific 
genius, is regularly drafted. This education is, in short, nothing but the free action of 
life and society, localized, economized, and brought to bear." — (" Oxford Essays for 1855," 
p. 259.) 



20 LI BE It AL EDUCATION OF THE 

what are called the learned professions. The layman has nothing to 
do with the study of the science of theology : that must be expounded 
to him by his priest. The layman has nothing to do with the science 
of medicine : he must be cured, or, more probably, killed, secundum 
artem, by his physician. The layman has nothing to do with the 
science of the law : it is his business to get into lawsuits, and it is 
the lawyer's secret how to extricate him. But these superstitions, 
the relics of an age of popular ignorance, are in their turn disappear- 
ing, as just ideas of what constitutes real knowledge begin to penetrate 
the minds of the whole people. It is seen that, so far from being mys- 
terious, such knowledge is the very substance and material of sound 
education for all men ; and the layman will no longer allow himself 
to be led blindfold by priest, or lawyer, or physician, for there is no 
longer any magical sacredness in their callings. And thus it comes 
about that a knowledge of physiology, which will help save the pa- 
tient from any need of a physician ; a knowledge of law, that shall 
obviate the necessity for lawsuits ; a knowledge of political science 
and history worthy of men who have become their own rulers ; a 
knowledge of political economy, that shall raise the honorable calling 
of the merchant to the dignity of a liberal profession ; a knowledge of 
theology that shall save us the degrading spectacle of the unchristian 
quarrels of bigoted and superstitious sects — are reckoned more and 
more to be essential elements in all education. It is only on sound 
general knowledge, disseminated through the whole people by a lib- 
eral education of the whole people, that we shall ever build up pro- 
fessions, in regard to which we are not forced to entertain a doubt as 
to whether they are not on the whole more of a curse to us than a 
blessing. 1 And an education of this sort must be begun in the primary 
school, must have for its instrument the mother-tongue. It cannot be 
based on the study of Greek particles, or any amount of skill, either in 
the reading or the manufacture of Latin verses. 

It is sometimes said that we, who have received this liberal educa- 
tion we decry, are ungrateful in thus decrying it, and unconscious of, 
and insensible to, all the benefits we derive from it. I am conscious of 
no ingratitude in agreeing with an eminent Scotchman who discusses 
these subjects, when he says, in speaking of knowledge and studies such 
as I have been enumerating : " I am sure no one seriously applies him- 
self to such studies without wishing that he had given to them many 
hours in his youth which he fooled away, in obedience to his ' pastors 

1 " We need diffused knowledge in the community to sustain soundness of public 
opinion, and prevent the perversion of separate sciences into black arts and professional 
secrets." — (Prof. Newman, on the Relations of Free Knowledge to Modern Sentiments.) 

The affirmation of Prof. Seeley is destined, I fear, to find an illustration in the expe- 
rience of this country, " that a people will never have a supply of competent politicians 
until political science ... is made a prominent part of the higher education." — Inaugu- 
ral Address on the Teaching of Politics. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY. 31 

and masters,' in learning what he has now forgotten, and to recall 
which he would not now take the trouble to raise his little finger." 1 
I was the docile and diligent receiver of such training as, in my youth, 
a " classical school " and our oldest New-England college had to give, 
and surely it is from no vanity that I say that I was also a recipient 
of their honors ; and it is from the melancholy feeling that my formal 
education was so barren and empty when looked at from the stand- 
point of real life, and real thought, and real mental training, that I am 
so earnest an advocate of changes that I believe will give to future 
generations the reality instead of the pretense of an education. 

I come now to the study of Physical Science, as from this time for- 
ward destined to play a wholly new part in our system of liberal edu- 
cation. Nowhere, save in that astonishing document, the Syllabus of 
his holiness Pope Pius IX., can any education-philosophy be found 
so benighted as not to recognize its value and importance. Yet I am 
far from believing that its true place, as a factor in the new education, 
has yet been determined. While, on the one hand, among the old 
high-and-dry advocates of the grindstone-system, certain merits and a 
subordinate place are beginning to be grudgingly allowed it, we are 
in danger, on the other hand, in this new country of ours, whose vast 
material resources are waiting for development through its instrumen- 
tality, rather of overrating than underrating its purely educational 
function. It is not as an economical instrument for the development 
of material wealth that I have here to deal with it, though that is a 
very important aspect, but considered as a factor in a system of edu- 
cation, and, as such, I claim for it no monopoly, but only a place as 
the indispensable complement to those ethical and linguistic studies 
which have heretofore monopolized the title of a liberal education, 
and which, from the absence of science from that form of education, 
have been reduced to their present effete and impotent condition. It 
is to the incorporation into it of the study of science that we are to 
look as the source of new life-blood. 

You will not exjDect me to attempt to deal here with the great sub- 
ject which forever occupies the minds of speculative thinkers, and 
never more than at the present moment — the true relations of the world 
of matter and the world of mind. That is too large a subject to be 
dealt with, though upon right views regarding it will greatly depend 
the correctness even of our educational theories. I will only say, that 
though I am as far as possible from being an adherent of any form of 
materialism, yet I believe that physical science is destined to be the 
great instrument of these modern days to give new forms to our phi- 
losophy and our theology — to give new forms to the same everlasting 
problems, but not to give us new philosophy or new theology. It 
will but cast old truths in new moulds, while it explodes old super- 

1 Mountstuart, E. Grant Duff, Inaugural Address as Rector of the University of Aber- 
deen, p. 22. 



22 LIBERAL EDUCATION OF THE 

stitions by adding new truths to the old ones. Our conservatives may 
spare their anxieties. Not a truth the world gains is ever lost again ; 
but they who, blindly believing they have all truth, oppose the new 
form which science is giving to all knowledge, will soon find them- 
selves side by side with those old Duusemen who could not believe in 
the last revival of learning. 1 

Now, if the study of physical science is to play a vastly more im- 
portant part than it has hitherto done in all future schemes of liberal 
education, the first and most obvious consideration is that room must 
be found for it. Bearing in mind, as we must constantly do, that the 
word education stands for a strictly limited quantity, a limited amount 
of time, a definite amount of mental effort, if that time and mental 
effort have been wholly absorbed in one set of studies, it is very ob- 
vious that these must undergo modification and curtailment in order 
to make room for another set. And yet no error is at present more 
common or more disastrous than the attempt to introduce the new, 
without any disturbance of the older studies. Either the older curricu- 
lum did not absorb, as it professed to do, the whole of the student's 
mental energies, and was not therefore a complete education, or its 
requisitions must be diminished to make room for another set of solid, 
important, and disciplinary studies ; or else it must be maintained 
that the new studies are not solid, important, and disciplinary, but 
only fitted to be the amusement of idle hours, and the lighter tasks 
with which gaps and intervals may be filled between the more solid, 
older ones. That this latter is really the view of the more thorough- 
going adherents of the classical system is pretty obvious. Thus the 
Rev. S. Hawtrey, one of the masters of Eton, says, in a recently- 
printed lecture : " It is for the masses that I fear, when I hear the cry 
that boys should be freed from the severer labor of studying language 
if it is distasteful, and therefore it is said unprofitable, and should 
learn, instead, something about the wonders which science has achieved 
in the present century." 2 It is very obvious that a writer who speaks 

1 " There is no reason for thinking that philosophy, which is only a just and perfect 
judgment on the bearings and relations of knowledge, should not be as generally attain- 
able as a wise judgment in practical matters is. And should our universities, ceasing to 
be schools of grammar and mathematics, resume their proper functions, it will be found 
that a far larger proportion of minds than we now suspect are capable of arriving at this 
stage of progress. For, be it again repeated, it it not a knowledge, but a discipline that 
is required ; not science, but the scientific habit ; not erudition, but scholarship. And 
those who have not leisure to amass stores of knowledge to master in detail the facts of 
science, may yet acquire the power of scientific insight, if opportunity is afforded them. 
It is the want of this discernment and the absence of the proper cultivation of it which 
produce that deluge of crude speculation and vague mysticism which pervades the 
philosophical and religious literature of the day, and which is sometimes wrongly as- 
cribed to the importation of philosophy itself and its recent unreasonable intrusion on 
our practical good sense. The business of the highest education is not to check, but to 
regulate this movement ; not to prohibit speculation, but to supply the discipline which 
alone tan safely wield it," — (Fatlison, in "Oxford Essays for 1855," p. 258.) 

9 "A Narrative-Essay on a Liberal Education," p. 29. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY. 23 

of the severer study of language has very little comprehension of the 
true nature of the study of science, or else, like the public orator of 
Cambridge, in his " tonic " theory, confounds together the ideas of 
severity and distastefulness. And Mr. Hawtrey's very childish con- 
ceptions in regard to the teaching of science are further exemplified 
when he goes on to ask : " Would there not be great danger of boys 
becoming less vigorous-minded than they are ? . . . "Will their becom- 
ing acquainted with a string of scientific results stand them instead 
of the mental training they now get ? " 

Thus we see that the highest conception a master of Eton has of 
the study of science is that it is " becoming acquainted with a string 
of scientific results." I need not pause before this audience to refute 
such a notion. If the study of modern science did not call for the ex- 
ercise of all the highest faculties of man ; if it did not give an exercise 
such as no other study gives to his reasoning as well as his observing 
powers ; if without it the very study of language itself did not become 
empty and barren ; if a knowledge of it were not necessary to the 
solution of all the profoundest philosophical problems with which the 
mind of man in these generations is occupied — then, indeed, a question 
might be raised as to the propriety of its introduction into the curricu- 
lum of liberal study. But if it is this, and more than all this, then 
it claims more than a subordinate place ; it is no toy for idle hours, 
no subject to fill up gaps and intervals of time. It claims a right to 
no less than a full half of all available time and power ; of time for 
training the student's senses — all left by our older training in worse 
than Egyptian darkness — of power to be employed in training the 
reasoning faculties, by processes as rigorous as any the older studies 
can boast of. Nothing less than this will satisfy the demands of sci- 
ence as an element in modern liberal education. 

I have already indicated what seems to me to be the only way by 
which room can be found for the real introduction of science into our 
scheme of studies. By removing Greek wholly from the list of gen- 
eral studies to that list of specialties which make up our completed 
conception of the higher education, after it diverges in different direc- 
tions ; by relegating Latin to a subordinate instead of a primary place 
in language-training, we shall find room to place science on an equal 
footing with literature as an instrument of general liberal culture ; 
and I see no other way. And this scheme will have this further ad- 
vantage, that, for all who carry their education beyond its rudimen- 
tary stages," it will afford ample time and opportunity for the real mas- 
tery of at least two of the leading modern languages besides our own : 
for French, the modern daughter of the Latin — for German, a kindred 
Teutonic dialect closely related to our own. I am aware that such a 
scheme for the teaching of modern languages, including our own, so 
systematically and scientifically, as that the mental discipline de- 
rived from it shall not be inferior to that derived from the teaching 



24 LIBERAL EDUCATION OF THE 

of the classics, implies an adaptation of the results of modern philology 
to the purposes of elementary instruction such as has hardly yet been 
realized ; implies a body of teachers of modern linguistic science such 
as hardly yet exist — teachers whose instruction shall not he inferior in 
philosophic breadth and thoroughness to the very best of classical 
teaching. If we have few such books or teachers yet, there are indi- 
cations on every hand that we very soon shall have them in the great- 
est abundance, and that modern language-teaching and English lan- 
guage-teaching are very soon to be relieved of the reproach of empiri- 
cism which has heretofore prevented them from taking the leading 
place which, as educating instrumentalities, rightfully belongs to them. 
And, finally, time will also be gained by utilizing the at present 
barren and empty study of mathematics. If there is any thing more 
preposterous than the abuse of grammar, in our present grindstone- 
system, it is the abuse of mathematical study. Rightly viewed, the 
mathematics are the key to scientific, as language is the key to ethical 
study. At present, both are used as mental tread-mills, unprofitable 
mental gymnastics, keys to unlock empty chambers never destined to 
be filled ; for their sole value is thought to lie in the mental exercise 
they give, Robbed thus of all living connection with other knowledge, 
they become the most disgustful, and therefore the most valueless, of 
mental exercise. Put into vital connection from the very outset with 
those great sciences, of whose laws they are only the symbolic lan- 
guage, the mathematics spring into life. By themselves, they are to 
most minds a series of barren puzzles, hardly rising in dignity or edu- 
cational value above the game of chess, and so remote from all those 
paths in which the human mind naturally travels, that it is only one 
peculiarly-constituted mind in ten thousand that, in their abstract 
form, can pursue them with either pleasure or profit. 1 Looked at as 
the language of the laws which govern the world of matter, and used 
as the instruments to unlock so many of its secrets, they lose their clis- 
gustfulness, and become a necessary, if a narrow and partial instru- 

1 Since writing the above, I have met with an unexpected corroboration of this view 
in the writings of an eminent mathematician. "I am not likely," says Mr. Todhunter, 
the distinguished mathematical teacher of English Cambridge, " to underrate the special 
ability which is thus cherished (by competitive examinations), but I cannot feel that I 
esteem it so highly as the practice of the university really suggests. It seems to me at 
least partially to resemble the chess-playing power which we find marvelously developed 
in some persons. The feats which we see or know to be performed by adepts at this 
game are very striking, but the utility of them may be doubted, whether we regard the 
chess-player as an end to himself or to his country." — (" The Conflict of Studies," p. 19.) 
"What the teaching of the higher mathematics appears to have become at Cambridge, 
that the teaching of their elements, divorced from their natural connection with the 
teaching of physical science, becomes in our schools and colleges. 

On the fallacy that it was the mathematical studies at Cambridge of certain eminent 
graduates of Cambridge that was the cause of their eminence, and for some wholesome 
common-sense, in regard to the general subject, see a recently-published pamphlet, " The 
Mathematical Tripos," by the Rev. II. A. Morgan, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY. 2 $ 

ment of training — one which performs certain disciplinary functions 
> which no other instrument can perform so well; but it is only live 
mathematics, not dead mathematics, mathematical in vital connection 
with physical science, not prematurely thrust as an ugly skeleton alone 
upon the youthful mind, upon the pretense that its sole object is their 
mental discipline. And, on the other hand, it is only for the study of 
physical science, pursued by vigorous scientific methods, and in rigor- 
ous, logical, and mathematical ways, that we can claim for it a place 
as a disciplinary, that is, a real study. As the mere becoming ac- 
quainted with a string of scientific results, it may well be left to the 
contempt of the Rev. Mr. Hawtrey. 

But the chief influence of modern science upon liberal education 
will be its ethical influence. Its discoveries are transforming man's 
conception of the earth he lives on, and of his history and his work 
upon it. Before man acquires the control of matter, through ascer- 
tainment of the laws that govern it, his life on earth is poor, narrow, 
and full of hardship, and his earthly relations full of pain. So long as 
that state continues, life on earth must seem to him a small matter, 
and its opportunities for growth not much worth considering ; it is 
only here and there that a philosopher in his closet attains to some 
realization of the capacities that lie hidden in it. War and savage 
occupations consume the days of the mass of men, and no culture is 
possible save the perverted culture of the cloister. But the advent 
of physical science means the emancipation of the masses into the 
privileges of intellectual life. From a battle-ground, the earth is trans- 
formed into a school-room, written all over with hieroglyphics, no 
longer mysterious, but to which mankind have found the key : and, 
with the right use of the secrets thus unfolded, will come to the mass 
of men that accession of material wealth which will give the leisure 
and opportunities that have heretofore been the monopoly of privi- 
leged classes. 

It is not wonderful that men, at first, are carried away with the con- 
templation of its lower uses, even sometimes to the making them the 
sole end of education. It is but a reaction from the opposite extreme, 
only a dazzling of eyes with a flood of new light. Presently we 
shall look about us, and find the old relations of things . not greatly 
altered. Matter is not going to supplant mind because we are learn- 
ing so much more about it ; whether we understand or do not under- 
stand the laws that govern it, matter remains the servant of mind, to 
educate it and do its bidding. The higher uses of science will still 
be spiritual uses. It has not come into the world merely to carry us 
faster through space, merely that we may sleep more softly and eat and 
drink more luxuriously, nor will education become the mere teaching 
how to do these things. It is with the spiritual educating function 
alone that we have to deal when we consider it as an element in lib- 
eral education. 



2 6 LIBERAL EDUCATION OF THE 

And thus one great result of the new form into which modern 
science is casting all our conceptions of education will be a vastly 
higher estimate of the educating value of those pursuits in life which 
are concerned with material things, and a distinct recognition of them 
as included among the liberal professions. It is interesting to observe 
how the list of liberal professions enlarges with the advance of civiliza- 
tion. At first the priest is the divinely-appointed monopolist of all 
higher knowledge ; by degrees he is joined by the lawyer, as the in- 
terpreter still of a divinely-established code; it is much later and only 
after a certain amount of progress has been made in physical knowl- 
edge that the importance of his function raises the physician's art to 
the dignity of a liberal profession ; and that more at first through a 
superstitious belief in the power of his spells and his magic than from 
respect to the small reality of his science. Now that science has so 
far entered into other callings as to make them worthy fields for the 
exercise of the highest faculties, all those pursuits which have for their 
aim the improvement of man's earthly condition will take their due 
rank in the list of liberal professions, and the chemist, the engineer, 
the architect, and the merchant, will have their appropriate liberal 
educations as much as this clergyman, the lawyer, or the physician. It 
may safely be affirmed that that view of earthly life of mediaeval as- 
cetics which has left its traces so deeply imprinted in much of our sec- 
tarian theology is fast vanishing like an ugly dream forever. The 
intellectual and moral aspect of material pursuits is fast gaining, 
through the significance given to them by modern science, a predomi- 
nance over their mere material aspect. The worker in material things 
is more and more, as the days go by, compelled to be an intellectual 
being even in order to be a worker, and it is because the study of and 
working in material things now give scope for the energies of great 
intellects, that they moi*e and more absorb them. Whoever continues 
to believe in the antithesis between matter and spirit, and insists upon 
looking on the world of material things as of necessity the world of 
the devil, must see in this tendency only disaster to all our higher in- 
terests ; but whoever sees that it is the true function of modern science 
to spiritualize material things by enabling us to put them to higher 
uses, will see in science not the great antagonist but the great hope of 
the religion and the philosophy of the future. 1 

The advocates of the classical theory are never weary of reproach- 
ing their opponents with opinions which, as they say, degrade the dig- 
nity of true learning, by making it subservient to mere utilitarian 

1 The spirit of the older education is well represented in the following extract from a 
work of that learned and arrogant pedant, the late Dr. Donaldson. He says : " If, then, 
the education of the whole community is so dependent on that of the upper classes, and 
if these owe their normal influence to the circumstances which enable them to escape the 
trammels of material interests, it must follow that the liberal education which is the pecul- 
iar attribute of the highest order ought to consist in the literature which humanizes and 
generalizes our views, and not in the science which provides for the increase of opulence 



NINETEENTH CENTURY. 27 

aims. If to try by knowledge to make this world a better place to 
live in, and to teach men how to make the highest and. best use of it 
be utilitarianism, then I make bold, to say that any knowledge that 
cannot make good its claim to such usefulness is worse than utilita- 
rian, for it is useless knowledge. The charge that is meant to be 
brought is this, that none but the advocates of classical learning have 
or can have the higher ends of life in view in planning schemes of edu- 
cation ; that all other systems look solely to the stomach or the pocket. 
I do not know whether such charges are not too hackneyed to waste 
words on ; certainly I can conceive of no lower form of utilitarian abuse 
of education than the pursuit of fellowships by the cramming of Greek 
and mathematics for the competitive examinations of an English 
university. On the other hand, the truly liberal learning of England 
is to be found more than anywhere else at this moment with that noble 
band of students of science who are virtually excluded from all such 
preferments. 1 It is not a difference in studies that constitutes them 
liberal or illiberal ; it is a difference in the spirit in which all studies 
may be pursued. The study of chemistry and the study of Greek 
particles may be equally base or equally noble, according as they are 
pursued worthily or unworthily, with a selfish eye to the loaves and 
fishes, or with an aim at the higher rewards of true culture, and the 
higher advancement of man's estate. But I think we may well leave 
aside this stupid charge of utilitarianism. It comes nowadays only 
from those benighted pedants who are wholly ignorant of the true 
spirit of modern science. 

I have left myself no room, even if I were competent, to speak of 
the last ingredient in any just scheme of modern liberal education — the 
study of art, aesthetic culture. I fear there will be abundance of time 
to develop that side of the question in this country before it is in any 

and comfort. The higher training of our youth must not be that of a polytechnic school. 
We want such institutions, no doubt, for we need observers and surveyors, engineers and 
artillerymen to do the work, which can best be performed by such intelligent automatons." 
— (" Classical Scholarship and Classical Learning," p. 90.) 

1 " I believe there can be no doubt that the foreigner, who should wish to become ac- 
quainted with the scientific or the literary activity of modern England, would simply lose 
his time and his pains if he visited our universities with that object. . . . England can 
show now, as she has been able to show in every generation since civilization spread over 
the West, individual men who hold their own against the world, and keep alive the old 
tradition of her intellectual eminence. But in the majority of cases these men are what 
they are in virtue of their native intellectual force, and of a strength of character which 
will not recognize impediments. They are not trained in the courts of the temple of 
science, but storm the walls of that edifice in all sorts of irregular ways, and with much 
loss of time and power, in order to obtain their legitimate positions. Our universities not 
only do not encourage such men, do not offer them positions in which it should be their 
highest duty to do thoroughly that which they are most capable of doing ; but, as far as 
possible, university training shuts out of the minds of those among them who are sub- 
jected to it the prospect that there is any thing in the world for which they are specially 
fitted." — (Huxley, "Lay Sermons," p. 55.) 



2 3 LIBERAL EDUCATION, ETC. 

danger of becoming a practical one. Yet, in the shape of elementary 
drawing, the rudiments of art are beginning to take their proper place 
in our schools as a necessary and indispensable element of all real 
education, and the art galleries and the foreign musicians of a few of 
our older cities are beginning to exert their influence, if a slight one, 
in introducing higher ideas of the importance of art into our new coun- 
try. They will have but a limited influence, however, till the study 
of the fine arts takes its proper place among us as a necessary element 
in every conception of true education. 

There is one form of art-study, and that, perhaps, the highest, 
which is open to all, even to the humblest student, and the most ele- 
mentary school, and that is, the study of poetry. It is a prime element 
in any conception of a liberal education, which shall take as its chief 
instrument of language-training the mother-tongue, that the real study 
of English poetry will take the place of the pretended study of classi- 
cal poetry. When that time comes, we may expect to see the great 
poets of our native tongue exerting the same influence in the culture 
and training of our children that Homer and JEschylus really exercised 
over that of the Greeks. We shall not know what that influence is 
capable of becoming till we have a real study of English, in place of a 
sham study of classical literature. The great Greek philosopher says 
that poetry is truer than history. Sure I am that we shall one day 
come to see that in neglecting to train and cultivate the imagination, 
we are neglecting the most powerful of all the faculties. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I have thus given you, very feebly and im- 
perfectly, an outline of a scheme of liberal education, applicable to a 
whole free people, which shall use that people's own language on the 
one hand, and the great instrument of modern science on the other, as 
its chief disciplinary instruments, in lieu of the obsolescent scheme for 
a liberal class education, based upon the study of dead languages as 
its chief educating instrument. As a means for realizing that scheme 
for the liberal education of the whole people, I believe that we must 
sooner or later have in this our republic one homogeneous system of 
free schools, from the lowest to the highest. The first step of that 
education will be taken from the benches of the primary school, its 
last lessons learned in the lecture-rooms and laboratories of universities, 
free from all trammels of sectarian narrowness or class distinctions. 
It will be from first to last a homogeneous, logically compacted, con- 
sistent training in all available knowledge, to all attainable wisdom, 
free to all men and all women to pursue to the extent the faculties God 
has endowed them with will carry them. It is a Utopian vision, you 
will say, this of popular liberal education. Say rather it is the neces- 
sary safeguard and supplement of free institutions ; to despair of it is 
to despair of the republic. 



An Important Work for Manufacturers, Chemists, and Students, 



A HAND-BOOK 



OP 



By RUDOLF WAGNER, Ph. D., 

PE07ESSOB OF CHEMICAL TECHNOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OP WURTZBURG. 

Translated and edited, from the eighth German edition, with extensive 

Additions, 

By WM. CROOKES, F. R. S. 
With 336 Illustrations. 1 vol., 8vo. 1Q1 pages. Cloth, $5.00. 



The several editions of Professor Rudolf Wagner's " Handhuch del 

Chemischen Technologie " have succeeded each other so 

rapidly, that no apology is needed in offering 

a translation to the public. 

Under the head of Metallurgic Chemistry, the latest methods of preparing 
Iron, Cobalt, Nickel, Copper, Copper Salts, Lead and Tin and their Salts, Bis- 
muth, Zinc, Zinc Salts, Cadmium, Antimony, Arsenic, Mercury, Platinum, Silver, 
Gold, Manganates, Aluminum, and Magnesium, are described. The various ap- 
plications of the Voltaic Current to Electro-Metallurgy follow under this divis- 
ion. The Preparation of Potash and Soda Salts, the Manufacture of Sulphuric 
Acid, and the Kecovery of Sulphur from Soda-Waste, of course occupy promi- 
nent places in the consideration of chemical manufactures. It is difficult to 
over-estimate the mercantile value of Mond's process, as well as the many new 
and important applications of Bisulphide of Carbon. The manufacture of Soap 
will be found to include much detail. The Technology of Glass, Stoneware, 
Limes and Mortars, will present much of interest to the Builder and Engineer. 
The Technology of Vegetable Fibres has been considered to include the prepa- 
ration of Flax, Hemp, Cotton, as well as Paper-making ; while the applications 
of Vegetable Products will be found to include Sugar-boiling, "Wine and Beer 
Brewing, the Distillation of Spirits, the Baking of Bread, the Preparation of 
Vinegar, the Preservation of "Wood, etc. 

Dr. "Wagner gives much information in reference to the production of Potash 
from Sugar-residues. The use of Baryta Salts is also fully described, as well as 
the preparation of Sugar from Beet-roots. Tanning, the Preservation of Meat, 
Milk, etc., the Preparation of Phosphorus and Animal Charcoal, are considered 
as belonging to the Technology of Animal Products. The Preparation of ths 
Materials for Dyeing has necessarily required much space ; while the final sec- 
tions of the book have been devoted to the Technology of Heating and Illumi- 
nation. 

D. APPLETOT & CO., Publishers. 



EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS. 



The educational demands of the age are extending to new fields. Modern research in 
the realms of Science and Nature is revealing studies of the most intense interest, from 
which are growing new modes of mental culture and new educational processes. 

Among the most interesting and valuable accompaniments for the teacher, in har- 
mony with this irresistible advance of scientific thought, are several recent educational 
publications of D. APPLETON & CO., New York. The subjects treated are 

THE NATURAL SCIENCES, 

including Natural Philosophy, Botany, Astronomy, Chemistry, Physiology, etc., 
Geography, Drawing, Ancient and Modern Languages, etc. 

Among the newest works of especial excellence are 

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, ' 

YOUMANS'S BOTANIES, 

SCIENCE PRIMERS, 
DESCHANEL'S NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, 

CORNELL'S PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHIES, 

KRUSI'S INVENTIVE DRAWING, 

AND MANY OTHERS. 

Teachers are particularly invited to address the publishers, stating upon which sub- 
jects they are desiring new or improved text-books for class introduction, and their 
communications will receive full and prompt attention. 

A new Educational Catalogue, just published, and printed in the most attractive 
manner, will be mailed free to educators, on application. Also, the Educational Record 
for 1873. Address 

D. APPLETOX & CO., Publishers, 549 & 551 Broadway, N. T. 

NOW MEAJDY. 



THE MOON: 

HER MOTIONS, ASPECT, SCENERY, AND PHYSICAL CONDITION. 

By RICHARD A. PROCTOR, B. A., Cambridge, 

HONORARY SECRETARY OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY ; AUTHOR OF " THE SUN," " SATURN 

AND ITS SYSTEM," "THE ORBS AROUND US," "ESSAYB ON ASTRONOMY," 

" OTHER WORLDS THAN OURS," ETC., ETC. 

With Three Lunar Photographs by Rutherford, enlarged by Brothers ; Map of the Moon 
from t/ie Map/pa Selenographica of Beer and Madler ; and Chart of the Moon on 
the Slereographic Projection. 

1 vol. Crown, 8vc. 394 pages. Cloth. Price, $5.00. 

" I have adopted a much more complete and exact system of illustration in dealing with the 
Moon's motions than either of my predecessors in the explanation of this subject. I attach great 
importance to this feature of my explanation, experience having satisfied me not only that such 
matters should be very freely illustrated, but that the illustrations should aim at correctness of 
detail, and (wherever practicable) of scale also. 

" Some features, as the advance of the perigee and the retreat of the nodes, have, I believe, 
never hefore been illustrated at all. 

" The table of lunar elements will be found more complete than that usually given. In fact, in 
this table, and throughout the work, my aim has been to help the student of the subject by supply- 
ing information not given, or not so completely given, elsewnere. It has always seemed to me that, 
although in works on scientific subjects much of what is written must be common property and 
many facts must be compiled from the writings of other authors, the main purpose of the writer 
should be to present results which he has hiihself worked out and which are calculated to be of us« 
to others."— From Author's Preface. 

D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers. 



DESCHANEL'S NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, 



NATURAL PHILOSOPHY: 

AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE. 
By PROFESSOR DESCHANEL, of Paris. 

Translated, with Extensive Additions, 
By J. D. EVEKETT, D. 0. L., F. E. S., 

PROFESSOR OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE QUEEN'S COLLEGE, BELFAST. 

1 vol., medium 8vo. Illustrated by 760 Wood Engravings and 3 Colored Plates, 
Cloth, $ . Published, also, separately, in Four Parts. Limp cloth, each $1.75. 

Part I. MECHANICS, HYDROSTATICS, and PNEUMATICS. Part n. HEAT. 
Part III. ELECTRICITY and MAGNETISM. Part IV. SOUND and LIGHT, 

Saturday Review. 

" Systematically arranged, clearly written, and admirably illustrated, showing no less 
than 760 engravings on wood and three colored plates, it forms a model work for a class 
of experimental physics. Far from losing in its English dress any of the qualities of mat- 
ter or style which distinguished it in its original form, it may be said to have gained in 
the able hands of Professor Everett, both by way of arrangement and of incorporation of 
fresh matter, without parting in the translation with any of the freshness or force of the 
author's text." 

Athenmum. 

" A good working class-book for students in experimental physics." 

Westminster Review. 
"An excellent handbook of physics, especially suitable for self-instruction. . . . The 
work is published in a magnificent style ; the woodcuts especially are admirable." 

Quarterly Journal of Science. 
" We have no work in our own scientific literature to be compared with it, and we are 
glad that the translation has fallen into such good hands as those of Professor Everett, 
.... It will form an admirable text-book." 

Nature. 

" The engravings with which the work is illustrated are especially good, a point in which 
most of our English scientific works are lamentably deficient. . . . The clearness of Des- 
chanel's explanations is admirably preserved in the translation, while the value of the 
treatise is considerably enhanced by some important additions. . . . We believe the book 
will be found to supply a real need." 

D. APPLETON &o CO., NEW YORK. 



019 "598 379 T 

International Scientific series. 

■♦»» 

No. 1. FORMS OF WATER, in Clouds, Rain, Rivers, Ice, and Glaciers. By 

Prof. John Tyxdalx, LL. D., F. R. S. 1 vol. Cloth. Price, $1.50. 
No. 2. PHYSICS AND POLITICS; or, Thoughts on the Application of the 

Principles of "Natural Selection" and "Inheritance " to Political Society. 

By Walter Bagehot, Esq., author of " The English Constitution." 1 vol. 

Cloth. Price, $1.50. 
NO. 3. FOODS. ByDr.EDWAEDSMiTn,F.R.S. 1vol. Cloth. Price, $1.75. 
No. 4. MIND AND BODY. By Alexandeb Baht, P. R. S. 12mo. Cloth. 

Price, $1.50. 
NO. 5. STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. By LTeebert Spenoeb. 1 vol., 12mo. 

Cloth. Ready November 1st. 

PROS PECTUS. 

D. ArrLF.TON & Co. have the pleasure of announcing: that they have made arrangements for publishing, 
and have recently commenced the issue of, a Series of Popular Monographs, or small works, under 
the above title, which will embody the results of recent inquiry in the most ineresting departments of 
advancing science. 

The character and scope of this series will be best indicated by a reference to the names and subjects 
Included in the subjoined list, from which it will be seen that the cooperation of the most distinguished 
professors In England, Germany, France, and the United States, has been secured, and negotiations are 
pending for contributions from other eminent scientific writers. 

The" works will be issued simultaneously in New York, London, Paris, and Leipsic. 

The International Scientific Series is entirely an American project, and was originated and organ- 
ized by Dr E. L. Youmans, who spent the greater part of a year in Europe, arranging with authors and 
publishers. 

The forthcoming volumes are as follows : 



Prof. T. II. Huxley, LL. D., F. E. S., Bodily Motion 
and Consciousness. 

Dr. W. B. Carpenter. LL. D., F. E. S., The Prin- 
ciple* of Mental Physiology. 

Sir John Lubbock, Bart., F. E. S., The Antiquity 
of Man. 

Prof.'KunoLpn YiP.cnow (of the University of Ber- 
lin). Morbid Physiological Action. 

Prof. Baxfoub Stewart, LL.D.,F.E.S., The Con- 
serration of Energy. 

Dr. II. Charlton I?astu.n, M. D.,F. E. 8., The 
Bruin as an Organ of Mind. 

Prof. Josiaji P. Cooke, Jr., The New Chem- 
istry. 

Prof. W. TmsTi.ETON Dyer. B. A., B. Sc, Form and 
Habit of Flowering Plants. 

Dr. Edward Smith, F. E. S., On Diets. 

Prof. W. Kinsdon Clifford, M. A., The First 
/'/ tnciples of the Exact Sciences explained to 
the Ifon-Mathematical. 

Mr. J. N. Lockyer, F. It. S.. Spectrum Anal usis. 

W. Lauder Lindsay, M. D., F. E. S. E., Mind in 

Lower Animals. 

B. G. Ui-.i.i. Pettigrkw, M. D., The locomotion of 

Animal*, as exemplified in Walking, Sioim- 
ntiini. an>< Fhi'mg. 

Prof. -Tames 1). Dana, M. A.. LL. D., On Cepha- 
Ueation; or. Head Domination in its Re- 
lation to Structure, Grade, and Develop- 
in i wt. 

Prof. S. W. Johnson, M. A., On the Nutrition of 
Plant*. 

Prof. Austin Flint. .Tr., M. D., The Nervous Sys- 
tem, and if* /.'elation to the Bodily Func- 
tions. 



Prof. W. D. Whitney, 3/odern Linguistic Sci- 

Prof. A.' C. Eamsay, LL. D., F. E. S., Earth 
Sculptures 

Dr. Henry Maudsley, Responsibility in Dis- 
ease. 

Prof. Michael Foster, M. D., Protoplasm and 
the Cell Theory. 

Eev. M. J. Berkeley. M. A., F. L. S., Fungi; 
their Nature, Influences, and Uses. 

Prof. Claude Bernard (of the College of France), 
Physical and Metaphysical Phenomena of 
Life. 

Prof. A. Quetelet (of the Brussels Academy of 
Sciences), Social Physics. 

Prof. A. I ie Qcatrefages. The Negro Races. 

Prof. Lacazk-Dutiiiers, Zoology since Ciieier. 

Prof. C. A. Young, Ph. D. (of Dartmouth College), 
The Sun. 

Prof. Bernstein (University of Halle), The Physi- 
ology of the Si hs, s. 

Prof. Herman (University of Zurich), On Respira- 
tion. 

Prof. Lf.uckarp (University of Leipsic), Outlines 
or' I 'In mical Organization. 

Prof. KEE8 (University of Erlangen), On Parasitic 
Plants. 

Prof. Vogbl (Polytechnic Academy, Berlin), The 
Chemical Effects of Light. 

Prof. Windt (University of Strasbourg), On 
Sound. 

Prof. Schmidt (University of Strasbourg), The 
Theory or' Descent — Darwinism. 

Prof. BOSKNTHAI. (University of Erlangen), Physi- 
ology of Muscles and Nerves. 



Professors II. Saint-Claire Deville, Berthelot, and WuRTz.havo engaged to write, but have not 
yet announced their subjects. Other eminent authors, as Wallace, Helmiioltz, Parks, Milne-Ed\s 
and II. eckel, have given strong encouragement that they will also take part in the enterprise. 

D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, 549 & 551 Broadway, N. T. 



